According to a blog post over at google they have added a social bar to the popular friend connect application.
With the social bar, your visitors will be able to see crucial info at a glance and engage with social features through convenient drop-down gadgets.
On the far left, visitors can join your site, see their identity, and edit their profiles and settings.
Your visitors can also delve into your site's activity stream to see what's happening throughout your site. It includes links to recent posts made anywhere on your site, helping other visitors quickly find where the hottest conversations are taking place.
The wall gadget can host a discussion for the whole site, a section of pages, or each individual page, letting your visitors easily read and leave comments.
Lastly, visitors can see the other members of your site, check out their profiles to see how like-minded they really are, and even become friends.
This sounds like a positive development. I've been a little disappointed with Friend Connect so far.
I'm glad to see this posted. The first time one of these bars dropped down on me it kind of freaked me out. They look like some sort of adult popup at first.
It's also unclear to me how much of my information is being dropped down and where. With Google, I sometimes find myself having unwittingly 'opted in' to various associations with my Google ID.
I'm casting a naive "no" vote on the new Google bar. I could be convinced, I suppose.
sounds interesting ... we are all becoming more connected!